Omni Hotels and Resorts Drip Pricing California Class Action

This class action takes issue with a practice known as “drip pricing.” The complaint bring suit against Omni Hotels and Resorts and Omni Hotels Management Corporation, claiming that they do not reveal the full price of staying at their hotels up front but tack on additional but required charges later on. This, this complaint alleges, violates three of California’s state laws.

The class for this action is all consumers who paid for rooms at an Omni Hotel in California between September 10, 2016 and the preliminary approval of a settlement or a judgement in this case, whichever is earlier.

The complaint says the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) defines “drip pricing” as “a technique where companies advertise only part of a product’s or service’s price but then reveal other charges later as the consumer goes through the buying process.”

These extra charges may be mandatory, so that the consumer can’t avoid paying them by not choosing some part of the product or service. In this case, the charge in question is a resort fee or destination charge added to the hotel bill only after the per-night fee was advertised. According to the complaint, Omni advertises an expected fee, the per-night rate, which consumers think is the full basic price of a stay there, and the consumer only later discovers the mandatory resort fee/destination charge.

Plaintiff Nantille Charbonnet stayed at the Omni San Diego between September 1, 2019 and September 4, 2019. She believed she would pay only the advertised nightly room rate. It was only when she was checking out that she saw that a resort fee had been added to the bill.

The complaint alleges, “By waiting for hotel guests to check in and/or reserve before levying the resort fees, Omni constrains consumer options and consumers are prevented from obtaining the offer they expected at the advertised price.’

According to the complaint, “In November 2012, the FTC warned the hotel industry that the advertised price for hotel rooms should include the resort fees and should be provided to consumers at the outset and not during the checkout process.”

The complaint claims that this practice violates the Consumer Legal Remedies Act, because Omni has advertised the hotel rooms in ways other than the way in which it intends to sell them; it violates the Unfair Competition Law because drip pricing is likely to deceive members of the general public; and it violates the False Advertising Law because the advertised room rates did not include the mandatory resort fee/destination charge, so that Omni did not intend to sell the rooms as advertised.

Article Type: Lawsuit
Topic: Consumer
Tags: Charges in Excess of What Was Promised, Deceptive Pricing/Undisclosed Surcharges, Hotel Rooms & Reservations